Labor Day is essentially a closing ceremony for the greatest season of the year, leaving us with little to look forward to including, dwindling daylight hours, plummeting temperatures and school looming closer. So what better time to look ahead to see what our favorite artists have in store for the rest of the year?

All week, we'll be looking at the most exciting things to look forward to this year, from A-Z, 26 in all. From Ariana Grande and Beyonce to Lady Gaga, One Direction, Rick Ross and Zendaya, we've got everything you need to know on the music you'll need to own.

Today's list kicks off with the second album from 2 vChainz and includes the debut from Grande and everything we know about Austin Mahone's upcoming album.

2 Chainz: B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time

Release date: September 10

The word: "You don't want to have the whole album about one thing, but I definitely show growth on there. I talk about gaining friends, losing friends; reality rap man. I talk about current events," 2 Chainz told MTV News correspondent Sway Calloway. "I definitely discuss it being my time. I feel like it's a changing of the guards. I feel like people need to recognize that it's about to be a new era."

Hear this: The Caribbean-tinged "Feds Watching" opened up a new lane for 2 Chainz, who has already mastered Atlanta's trap sound. Look for the Mannie Fresh-produced "Used 2" and Diplo-produced "Netflix" with Fergie to take Chainz into new territory.

Key players: Mike Will Made It, Pharrell Williams, Mannie Fresh, Drumma Boy and DJ ...

As if her opening set at last weekend's 2013 MTV Video Music Awards wasn't proof enough, Lady Gaga made sure the world knew she was back on Sunday (September 1) with a fierce album-preview performance to kick off the monthlong iTunes Festival.

Taking the stage at London's Roundhouse to play her first full live set since a hip injury
 scuttled her Born This Way Ball
 tour in February, Gaga blasted through seven (mostly unheard) tracks from her upcoming ARTPOP album.

The highly anticipated show, streamed all over the globe, was full of surprises, including the debut of "Jewels & Drugs," a trap-like tune featuring rappers T.I., Too $hort and Twista and Gaga's first stab at rhyming.

Dressed in a black ninja-style suit complete with black ski mask and a knife with "Hollywood" written on it, Gaga opened with the thumping new tune "Aura," singing while strapped into a black cage suspended above the stage. The industrial-style song featured the chorus, "Do you want to see me naked lover?/ Do you want to peek underneath the covers?/ Do you want to see the girl that lives behind the aura?"

Showing no signs of rust, Gaga leisurely changed into sparkly boots and a bra and told her Monsters, "To say that I've missed you, it's a bit of an understatement, isn't it?" In fact, she said she couldn't live without them. The next new one, "MANiCURE," found Gaga in a hand-clap-happy 50s rock mood that folded in a girl group groove and a touch of Joan Jett pop angst amid the repeated ...

Judging by her tweets about her upcoming iTunes Festival performance, Lady Gaga is looking to get nautical at the event she's dubbing "Swinefest" in honor of her new ARTPOP track, "Swine."

When Gaga takes the stage on Sunday at the month-long London festival, she will likely play and two tracks she's teased this week off of her upcoming record, ARTPOP. She will also, very likely, be trussed up like a mermaid of some sort — if her tweets have any veracity.

"I will be providing a list of acceptable attire for #SwineFest throughout the week. Item 1: Seashells. Item 2: Seahorses 3: Starfish," she tweeted Wednesday, followed by, "I would also suggestion [sic] 4. Paint colored dreadlocks for securing 'under the sea' Boticelli-Punk accessories. More fashion updates to come! X."

She also shared a The Little Mermaid gif and a photo of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus."

Yup, Gaga has gone blue — or, should we say, has gone blue again. This isn't the first time Mother Monster has splashed around in the deep end. Check out our four favorite fin-filled moments below:

Gaga's Blue Blowout
We're pretty sure that Mother Monster wasn't born this way. Back in 2011, Gaga often sported a blue wig, once even complementing her coif with sea-colored underarm tufts and turquoise merkin at the Much Music Awards in Toronto.

Mermaid Mating
During the course of her career, Gaga has cavorted as both a woman and a man (her alter-ego Jo Calderone). She has also stepped out — ...

Considering that director Morgan Spurlock banked hours-- nearly 1,000 of them -- of One Direction footage while shooting their new concert film/documentary, fans might get to see even more shirtless antics featuring the fivesome on DVD.

"We shot for six months. We shot 963 hours of footage over six months. It was massive," Spurlock told MTV News about working with the megastar boy band over the course of a half a year, including being with them while on their massive Take Me Home tour and tear-filled visits home to their families.

"It's tough when you start editing down a film to 90 minutes. What do you keep? What do you get rid of? And ultimately it's what continues to feed the narrative the best, what tells the best linear story. And that's what we kind of focused on," he said. "For me, the core of the movie is about dreams and it's about family and everything that inter-relates to that."

One Direction Answers Your Burning Questions!

However, the bottom line is there's plenty of new stuff Directioners can look forward to come DVD time. "So things that didn't relate to that kind of ended up on the cutting room floor," he said. "And hopefully they'll all end up on a great box set/DVD sometime."

Spurlock previously revealed to MTV News that despite the unprecedented access to 1D, there was one topic he didn't want to include in the flick.

"I made it a point to leave [girlfriend] relationships out of the film. They're young men, and from the very beginning I ...

One Direction, often sans shirt, hit a theater near you this weekend in their 3-D flick, . The film follows the boy band around the globe as they travel the world on their Take Me Home tour. And, while there are many tears shed in the flick, there are also a few laughs as well.

SPOILERS AHEAD
For fans who stick around right through the end credits, they are treated to a LOL-worthy montage of the guys at their goofiest. During the end credits, each of the fellas don various costumes (old men, fat suits), as they try to fool unsuspecting pedestrians. At one point, one of the guys even asks for "free hugs" while in disguise, with very few people biting at the opportunity.

Eventually, the bandmates reveal themselves in each of the pranks, much to the delight of the folks they were fooling. The disguises pay homage to an earlier prank, where Niall Horan dresses like a security guard at a 1D show and complains, a lot, to the young ladies in the crowd. Morgan Spurlock explained to MTV News about including both sides, the comedy and the drama, of the 1D coin.

Laugh Your Pants Off!
The prank sequences in the film definitely show off the fun side of the guys, who play tricks on each other, fans and their inner circle as a way of blowing off steam.

"That was important for me. They have such a great, fun-loving attitude, and you really want to see that shine through, but at the same they are running a business. These are ...

When hip-hop fans first heard Kendrick Lamar's electric verse on Big Sean's there was a collective gasp. Eager rappers hit the studio in response, but not Drake.

"[I] went about my day, went and got dinner and kept it moving," Drizzy told Billboard magazine in their latest issue of the verse in which K-Dot took Drake and a number of his other rap friends to task, stating that he will figuratively murder them with raps.

"I'm usually homeboys with the same n----s I'm rhymin with/ But this is hip-hop and them n----s should know what time it is/ And that goes for Jermaine Cole, Big K.R.I.T., Wale/ Pusha T, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Drake/ Big Sean, Jay Electron', Tyler, Mac Miller/ I got love for you all but I'm tryna murder you n----s/ Tryna make sure your core fans never heard of you n----s/ They don't wanna hear not one more noun or verb from you n---as," the Black Hippy MC rapped to the amazement of the rap world at large.

A number of MCs issued responses of different kinds, through the media, Twitter and through song — though none of the MC's named in the verse have released any rebuttal songs yet.

"I didn't really have anything to say about it," Drake said. "It just sounded like an ambitious thought to me. That's all it was. I know good and well that Kendrick's not murdering me, at all, in any platform. So when that day presents itself, I guess we can revisit the topic."

On Thursday, Lamar spoke to ...

Mark Ronson, who has produced for musicians like Adele, Lil Wayne, Nas, Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, lent his producing talents to Paul McCartney's new, very Beatles-esque single "New," which dropped late Wednesday ahead of the October 15 album by the same name. In a funny twist of fate, however, one missed phone call could have rewritten history.

Ronson told MTV News that he first started working with McCartney after DJing his wedding to Nancy Shevell two years ago. "He called me to ask me to do it and it was the same weekend of my own wedding and I completely spaced, because I kind of had other sh-- like my own wedding on my mind," Ronson said. "Then on my honeymoon 10 days later, I was like, 'F---! I forgot to call Paul McCartney back, which just sounds like a pretty ridiculous sentence."

Ronson called McCartney back to accept the gig and later went on to DJ another event for the former Beatle in New York. "I think I may subliminally planted an idea in his head that I would love to work together some time and I think he was into the idea, too," Ronson said of the budding relationship. "Then a few months later I got a call and he was like, 'Hey, do you want to come out to the studio?'"

From there, the two started messing around with ideas, including a track called "Secret Life of a Party Girl," which does not appear on McCartney's upcoming album, New. When Ronson heard the track "New," he was ...

Rico Love is a master at putting himself in other people's shoes. The producer/songwriter has made a lasting impression penning hits for Beyoncé, Usher, Trey Songz and Diddy, but now Rico is ready to embark on a new mission as he sings, raps, writes and produces on his debut EP Discrete Luxury.

With a gift for banging beats, a fine-tuned ear for melody and a surprising knack for rapping, Rico crafts a thought-out five-track ride that offers a little of everything. One of the project's most joyful takeaways is its witty look into the male/female dynamic, which is most exemplified on "Everybody's Girl."

On the song, which details the exploits of a very promiscuous woman, Love injects a light-hearted humor similar to Ma$e and a The College Dropout-era Kanye West. "First of all, a lot of people may not know that Ma$e kind of raised me. Ma$e taught me so much, I sat under him for so long, and he showed me a lot about the game and a lot about music, and I was always a fan," Rico told MTV News on Wednesday. "Me and Puff were always close friends and I grew up admiring the Bad Boy era, looking up to him. It's a natural thing for me to borrow from that sound."

"I bet she/ Got two phones, you be like, 'Do you smile like that when you text me'," he raps before singing: "yeah you love her, but she loves everyone."

"With 'Everybody's Girl,' the bounce that I wanted to use is not consistent with what's going ...

From the opening frames of Jay Z's "Holy Grail" video, you notice something is amiss.

Rather than seeing Justin Timberlake belt out his A cappella intro, the viewer instead gets Hov delivering a verse. His performance plays out over a series of nightmarish images — serpents, shadows, silhouettes shafts of light — that make the viewer feel cold, claustrophobic. Jay looks pensive, weary, almost trapped by the, uh, trappings of his success. And then, without notice, the entire video slows down, sags beneath its visual heft, then stops completely. The screen goes black.

Needless to say, it's unlike anything Jay or JT have done before. And it's all courtesy of director Anthony Mandler, who took Jay's #newrules mantra to heart, and set out to reinvent the very idea of a big-budget music video ... beginning with the music itself.

"Jay's committed to turning the rules upside down. He's willing to push the boundaries, flip the concepts, and allowed me the ability to be really disrespectful to the track, to re-cut it and change the order," Mandler told MTV News. "When we started the video, the idea wasn't to re-arrange the track; that came along the process of discovery, during the edit, when we had this idea of 'How do we turn the medium again?'

"Yes, I could craft a nine-minute, cinematic video, or Jay and I could step back, put some footage on the chopping block, put a chorus on the chopping block, surprise people and make this an experience," he continued. "It's a revision of the song ... I loved the ...